Twitter Tools leverages Social’s connection to Twitter so that you don’t have to create an app and copy keys around. It supports multiple accounts (must be authorized as “global” accounts in Social) with settings on a per-account basis.

Support Level: Product Support (we want to fix bugs and make the product great, but do not provide individual support).

Upgrading

If you have upgraded from an older version of Twitter Tools, your data will need to be converted to the new Twitter Tools format. On the Twitter Tools Options page you will see a prompt to upgrade if appropriate. Follow the steps to convert your data.

Twitter Tools now stores complete Twitter data along with your basic tweet content. Over time, Twitter Tools will request this data for upgraded tweets. This process make take a few days, as only 10 tweets are requested per hour (to avoid egatively impacting your rate limit).

Connecting Accounts

Any Twitter accounts connected on the Social settings page are available for Twitter Tools. You can enable them on a per-account account basis, as well as specifying per-account preferences for creating blog posts, etc. (on the Twitter Tools options screen).

Managing your Tweets

You can view, edit and delete (or unpublish) the local copy of your Tweets right in your WordPress admin. Navigate the tweets from the “Tweets” menu item and manage them just as you would any other post type. Twitter Tools does not know if you’ve deleted a tweet on Twitter, so you’ll need to also delete the copy of the tweet from the admin to remove it from your WordPress site.

Displaying your Tweets

Twitter Tools include options to create URLs for your local tweets using the following scheme:

single tweet: http://alexking.org/tweets/253580615113400321

account archive: http://alexking.org/tweet-accounts/alexkingorg

@mention archive: http://alexking.org/tweet-mentions/sogrady

#hashtag archive: http://alexking.org/tweet-hashtags/monktoberfest

You can enable public URLs for your tweets in your Twitter Tools settings. If you choose not to enable public URLs for your tweets, you can still vuew and manage them from within the admin screens.

Shortcode

You can use a shortcode to display a list of tweets.

[aktt_tweets account="alexkingorg"]

If you want, you can specify some additional parameters to control how many tweets are displayed:

[aktt_tweets account="alexkingorg" count="5" offset="0"]

You can also choose to explicitly include or exclude replies and retweets:

Widget

The options for the shortcode are also available for the Twitter Tools widget via a few settings.

Create Blog Posts

Twitter Tools can create a blog post from each of your Tweets. This feature can be enabled on a per-account basis. If there is an image included in the media data of the tweet Twitter Tools will try to save that image as the featured image for the post and append it to the blog post content.

Please note that this will take effect for all future tweets, it does not retroactively create posts for older tweets (though you could pretty easily script it to do so if you desired).

Customization

Twitter Tools is designed to be customizable via the standard hook/filter API. If you find you need additional hooks (or to suggest other bug fixes and enhancements) please create a pull request on GitHub.

https://github.com/crowdfavorite/wp-twitter-tools

Get creative! Here are some examples of ways to use more of the full Twitter data to create links back into Twitter where appropriate:

linking to the original tweet on Twitter

linking to “in reply to” tweets

Screenshots

Show your tweets on your site (optional).

Tweets can be viewed by account, @mention or #hashtag.

Manage your tweets in the standard WordPress admin interface.

View tweets by @mention, #hashtag, etc.

Easy interface to for per-account settings.

Installation

Twitter Tools relies on the Social plugin to connect to Twitter. If you aren’t already using this plugin please install it before installing Twitter Tools.

Go to the Plugins page in your WordPress Administration area and click ‘Activate’ for Twitter Tools.

Go to the Twitter Tools Options page (Settings > Twitter Tools) to set up your Twitter information and preferences.

FAQ

What if I don’t want to use Social’s comment display?

All of Social’s features (broadcasting, comment display, looking for responses on Twitter and Facebook and the ability to log in with Twitter or Facebook) can be disabled on Social’s settings screen.

Will Twitter Tools pull in my entire tweet archive from Twitter?

Twitter Tools starts archiving from the time you enable it. It does not try to download your entire tweet history. However, there is code in Twitter Tools that can be scripted to download and import tweets. You can put together the pieces with your own code to create the combination of features you desire. Here’s an Gist to get you started:

What happened to the digest features?

The digest features never worked reliably and were removed in version 3.0. Another developer is welcome to make a plugin that uses the underlying features of Twitter Tools to implement digest features.

What happened to the default hashtags feature?

These are no longer needed in 3.0+ since the default broadcast message is now fully customizable in the Social settings. Add your hashtags to your default broadcast message template.

How do I use a URL-shortener like bit.ly?

Since Twitter Tools no longer does broadcasting, this is really a question for Social. As noted in that FAQ, Social uses the built-in “short URL” feature of WordPress that supports any number of services via their plugins.

Reviews

I have been using this phased out plugin with no substitute in the horizon. Unfortunately ‘social’ is also phasing out and I don’t know how else I will convert my tweets into wp posts as perfect as this plugin use to. Wish someone would take over from where Alex King left off. He probably would too.

2.2.1

2.2

The use of the native json_encode() function, required by the changes in WordPress 2.9 (version 2.1) created a problem for users with servers running 32-bit PHP. the json_decode() function treats the tweet ID field as an integer instead of a string, which causes the issues. Thanks to Joe Tortuga and Ciaran Walsh for sending in the fix.